> Request for comments: what are the open topics in DHTs? Top of my head, can think of two topics: anonymous participation, and hidden rendezvous.
Anonymous participation is the idea that you can participate in a distributed system without revealing that to third parties, or at least to third parties that you do not trust. Think of the structure of underground networks, where members only communicate with people they really trust, because every contact that you don't know about could work for the Gestapo, or the KGB, or the RIAA. This implies serious restrictions on the topology of the graph, which means different message routing protocols than classic DHT like Kademlia. It also require secure protocols to add/remove contacts, or to connect/reconnect to the graph. Freenet's "dark net" does lots of that, and the question is, what would it take to make it mainstream? Hidden rendezvous is the idea of enabling something like Skype on a DHT, but hiding who communicates with whom. Suppose that I connect to the network anonymously, e.g. using a public Wi-Fi access point, and that you do the same. How do we find each other without revealing our location to the NSA and its peers? One potential solution is that we agree on a secret and derive from it a series of random numbers, say hash(secret, time-of-day, my-name). Then use that as a key to publish an IP address in the DHT. A bit clumsy, of course. Can you do better? -- Christian Huitema _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list [email protected] http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers
